[clug] MakeTheMove Website Demo

[Kelly Daly]

On Thu, 2006-09-07 at 12:44 +1000, Edward Lang wrote:
> One thing I've noticed in a corporate environment is that the TCO of a
> GNU/Linux system is of greater value than the price of individual
> components. Suitability / compatibility, design, testing, development,
> deployment, support and all that jazz. I know the large companies with
> a F/OSS bent are doing their hard sell on each of those topics but if
> the target audience for this website includes suits, then it may be
> worthwhile including responses to each of those items I listed (and
> more / fewer, as the case may be).

Was assuming this is more for the home user...  Apologies if that isn't
the intended audience, but the web page itself seems to suggest it is
marketed towards non-corporates (it's so happy and friendly looking!)

> I'd be tempted not to mention Microsoft products at all because there
> will always be differences, and more often than not OOo will be the
> worse of the two. Never mind that OOo might kick serious arse in other
> areas -- those negatives will stand out more than the positives.

I guess the reason why I say this is my own experiences trying
DESPERATELY to convert family and friends...  One of the big things that
people cling to is that linux can't do what windows can.  Everyone here
has heard the comments from non-linux users that it is old, clunky,
command line driven, and anything else that may have been told to them
from someone who looked at it ten years ago and gave it up as being not
as user friendly as MS shtuff.  If some don't even know that there is a
groovy gui front end that has equal or better usability than windows,
how can we expect them to realise that it has all these other features
that they also assume is purely windows/macOS?

ie - my dad was amazed that he could edit images and "surf the web" when
we finally convinced him to give it a go...  Even at that, it had to be
a dual boot system that defaults to windows.  Now he loves linux.  He
can see now that he can use it to write his invoices and print them for
his company, use spreadsheets to keep track of his accounts, check his
email without the fear of getting a new virus each week (even though his
virus scanner was always up to date).  

His windows machine was so weighed down with all the internet security
stuff he'd installed that it took a good 10 minutes to boot, and often
froze up when shutting down.  He's also spent hundreds of dollars (not
to mentions days and days of having no computer) in sending his computer
in to try to find out why his brand-spanking new machine with all the
bells and whistles takes so long to boot and won't close down cleanly
and always has programs freezing up.

This is the only reason he agreed to try linux - we convinced him to use
linux for his internet based stuff to avoid having to slow down
everything so badly by using all these clunky win firewalls, virus
scanners, etc.  Now he has all the security he needs on a system that
boots much faster than my work laptop.  Now he hardly ever goes into his
windows partition (only for one of his tax accounting spreadsheets for
his business that is full to overflowing of macros), preferring instead
to do everything he can on his ubuntu install.

So...  ALL he needed was to be convinced that if he could do it in win,
he could do it in linux (and the word of his daughter a couple of years
back wasn't good enough - it took my fiance to convince him).  Now he
doesn't need to pay all these subscriptions for virus scanners, pay for
firewalls, the hundreds of dollars in software licences that he keeps
having to upgrade every few years when he buys a new computer that comes
with the latest windows that won't run all the old stuff anymore.  

He's rapt on so many levels - and he's spreading the word.

Even my mum loves linux - and she's scared of using windows.  Really
scared.  I've had similar experience with quite a few others.


A few weeks ago there was an article in news.com.au basically claiming
that the only two operating systems in existence for your next PC will
be vista or macOS (it read like an MS sales pitch).  I felt greatly
heartened by the sheer volume of pro-linux responses telling the author
to get his head out of his nether-regions.  However, most of the pro-MS
ones read like "I died in twelve world wars, and when I was your age I
tried that linux thing, and there were about three commands you could
use with it, and just because windows has come along in leaps and bounds
since the middle ages, there's no reason to expect that anyone else's
software might. Really."


Sorry for the novel - just trying to get across that in my experience,
ppl really want to know what they can exchange current work practices
with.  They assume that it just can't be done in linux.  Just naming a
list of applications might not be enough - telling them what they can
replace it with is a far better approach.  "I use adobe photoshop now -
linux hasn't got like that where I can manipulate my images"  Why, yes
it has - try the gimp (which also doesn't have the $1300 price tag or
whatever it was last time dad purchased a copy).  That sort of thing...



Cheers,
K